Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
I think most of you need to worry way less about sounding sufficiently the “right kind” of leftist and focus more on promoting leftism through action. More than half the “tankie” discourse is, at best, a needless distraction from actual progress. Lose your buzzwords and stop the ideological purity pissing contest and actually put in the work in your communities instead, goddamn.
These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.
Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.
To be clear this isn’t me saying “be nice to the tankies” this is me saying “the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me.”
I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies. Tankies is a term coming from the UK i think the 80s some eastern european nation was taken over by the USSR and some Brittish came out in support of it. So they were called tankies.
These political fighting words need to be layed to rest. Communists hate me as much as anybody else but I’d rather engage on the idea level instead of ad hominem attacks and name calling.
I suspect this whole tankie thing might be a coordinated propaganda campaign geared at discrediting communists and at the same time creating tension between them and other leftits. I suspect this as this whole infighting over small differences doesn’t lead to a victory for the left but effectively disables and neutralizes it.
It became confusing when liberals learnt of the word - now they hurl the word at anyone who dares to remind them that being pro-capitalist is still a right-wing thing to be.
Hey everyone, just a reminder:
- Yes Nazis are also bad, we don’t have Nazis pop up anywhere near as often as Tankies
- We remove and ban Nazis too
- We’re aware of Lemmy’s main code writers being ML’s, and it’s not great.
- Please report any bigot bullshit, or fascist/tankie dogwhistles.
I’m not against the hostility being shown towards tankies here… but it should be remembered that there are a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the technocratic ideology tankies buy into. Let’s face it… if you google anything about leftism you are more likely to end up reading about Marx and Engels than Bakunin or Goldman - and right-wing propaganda is as perfectly fine with conflating everything “leftist” with the technocratic (ie authoritarian) left as tankies themselves are.
If we are leaving some doors open for fascists and capitalists who turn against their programming, we should remember to do the same for tankies.
As someone who’s read Marx and lenin, and Bakunin and Goldman… not to mention kroptikin(god damn that guy bullshat his way through conquest of bread)
The anarchists always decry practical steps that are needed for the transition, but they have a poverty of ideas when it comes to propose better alternative solutions to the problems faced by actual revolutions. And frankly, reading their literature I understand why. They’re still hung up on ideas and values and not material analysis much more than MLs. They’re still trapped within liberal hegemonic thought though they are against liberal capitalism.
Neither the anarchist revolutions in Ukraine nor Spain seemed to lack “practical steps”… what they did lack, however, was practical steps for turning into a reactionary elite as soon as they seized power - something the Bolsheviks and their ideological spawn seems to have no problems with.
They absolutely did, their inability to coordinate and make compromises during wartime absolutely led to their failures as revolutions.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism than any Leninist or Maoist tradition. But every leftist space on the internet seems to hate these “fake socialists” as much as anything else. That’s really all the evidence I need that these people are more interested in revolution fetish fan service than anything resembling actual statecraft.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism
Well… no, not really. It’s not that leftists hate social democrats… every anarchist I’ve ever spoken to appreciates the effort of people like Bernie and AOC - it’s just that we understand what they are allowed to do and what they aren’t. The political establishment will allow them to protect capitalism from itself by restraining it’s most obscene aspects it to a certain extent (and even such meagre self-protective measures are a bridge to far for the right-wing hivemind)… but that is all they could ever achieve.
Remember - no matter what the media hysterically screeches - the term socialism has a very hard and uncompromising meaning… a condition wherein the workers control the means of production. If it doesn’t measure up to that or only pretends to measure up to that, we can’t call it socialism with a straight face.
